Michael Wynn grew up in poverty on Chicago’s South Side.

No one in his family had graduated from college and the odds were stacked against him doing so either: the dropout rate at his high school was nearly 90 per cent; only 15 of the 500 students who started with him in the ninth grade continued on to university.

It’s a story he shares with young people in hopes of motivating them towards higher education, something he’s done since he graduated from Northeastern University in 1979.

The 59-year-old author spoke with students at the Berkeley Institute and CedarBridge Academy this week.

He was invited down by the leadership of Sandys 360, the community sports club that closed its doors to the public more than two years ago. Mr Wynn was an instrumental part of the organisation’s mentoring programme that continues to help 25 teenage boys thanks to sponsorship from Lancashire Insurance Company Ltd.

“Parents often have this long-term conversation with their children about what they want to do when they grow up, but what we need to do is the planning around that,” he told Lifestyle.

“I’ve met seniors in high school who said they wanted to become a doctor in primary school but they’ve been failing math and science. No one helped them align those goals with their actions.”

Children should be encouraged to work toward their potential, no matter where their strength lies, he said.

“We know children are gifted in so many different ways and we fail to recognise it and hone those gifts.

“Parents can play a key role with this in a child’s early stages, but eventually young people have to take ownership for their own college path. What I tell young people is I can support them, but it’s their race to run. I can give them suggestions on which high school courses to take, but you have to do the work to succeed in class.”

He only made it to university “by chance”, Mr Wynn said.

“There was no guidance in my high school to get to college. I attended a conference one day. I went there to take photographs. A guy called me over to his table and he presented me with an application form to fill in for Northeastern. I went back to my high school and didn’t tell anyone and I completed the application, sent it off and received a conditional acceptance.”

He had to take a calculus and physics class to get accepted. Mr Wynn spent an extra semester getting the credits at a community college, working for the US Postal Service on the side.

“I was focused on my studies because I knew that was a way out,” he said. “From a young age, before I even started school, although neither of my parents graduated from high school, my father always affirmed I was going to college. He knew a college education was the way out of poverty.

“In the end I passed both the physics and math class and started at Northeastern on January 19, 1975. I graduated from the engineering programme in 1979.”

He was recruited by IBM immediately after graduation.

To have full-time employment, get to drive his own car and have his own money was “an unimaginable experience” for him but the corporate world wasn’t the right fit. He returned to his childhood passion of writing poetry. It eventually got him a job teaching middle school students.

“I realised working with young people was my passion,” Mr Wynn said. “I started looking into the black male crisis in the United States and have been involved with the education crisis for over 30 years now.

“We’ve seen students move from primary school into colleges and universities across the country. Two are in law school, another one is in medical school at Morehouse, another is in graduate school and there’s one young man studying mechatronics engineering.”

One of the biggest challenges he’s encountered over the years is what he calls the “college knowledge gap”; students don’t know what is needed to get into the college of their choice or even how to go about applying.

“There’s an inequitable counsellor ratio in the States, meaning a lot of children don’t get the support they need early enough,” he said. “And with college admissions being so competitive and college tuition being so costly, students are likely to make the wrong college choices. There are students who are very bright and should be applying to schools they are academically qualified for. Instead they apply for more basic schools thinking they will get a scholarship, but those schools have more competitive financial aid policies.”

Instead of lecturing students, Mr Wynn tries to get them engaged in plotting their own path.

“Students research their own colleges and are able to conceptualise their own plans,” he said.